Especially in a CSI-driven era, when people may expect that every case has high-tech video and DNA, if not also a telepathic detective or two, it’s a useful reminder of the more mundane nature of real-world crime investigation.

And indeed, in the murder trial of Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their 21-year-old son Hamed, Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger did just that.

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On the first day of trial last week, Judge Maranger told jurors that “both kinds of evidence count; the law treats them equally.”

But suffice to say there may not be a jury in the country more excruciatingly familiar with the circumstantial stuff than this one.

Mr. Shafia, Wife No. 2 and their son are each pleading not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the June 30, 2009, drowning deaths of four of their family members – sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, respectively 19, 17 and 13, and Mr. Shafia’s first, and sadly infertile, wife, Rona Mohammad Amir, 53.

The prosecution’s case against the three, to judge by Crown prosecutor Laurie Lacelle’s opening statement, involves plenty of both sorts of evidence.

There will be a truckload of witnesses who will testify here about what one or another of the accused people told them; there are videotaped police interviews to be heard with each of the accused trio; there are police wiretaps to be played of the family’s conversations, some quite ghastly, after the four bodies were found.

And Thursday, the jurors will be taken to the Kingston Mills locks about 20 minutes out of town – the alleged scene of the crime and certainly the place where a black Nissan was discovered submerged in the water there, with the four women in it, the car improbably wedged in a small space between a lock gate and the push bar used to move it.

There, the jurors will see the place they have heard so much about and, as Judge Maranger said Wednesday, get the chance “to better appreciate some of the evidence.”

But absent eyewitnesses who saw the Nissan going into the water, or a videotape of same, or a breast-beating confession – the prosecutors have none of these – much of their case rests upon a mountain of circumstantial evidence and the expert interpretation of it.

The prosecutors’ theory is that the parents and son jointly planned what they call the deliberate murder of the four females, even researching murder on the web and the best places to commit it; that they attempted to cover up what they’d done by first blaming their eldest daughter for taking the keys to the Nissan and causing the fatal “accident,” and even staged a fake car crash to explain the damage to Mr. Shafia’s grey Lexus SUV; that they were motivated by a desire to restore family honour (thus the curious term “honour killing”) purportedly tainted by their rebellious daughters and their taking of boyfriends and wearing of makeup and revealing clothing.

Key are the links between the Nissan and the Lexus and the quality of work done by Kingston Police, the OPP experts they used and the analysis of other experts at the provincial crime lab in Toronto.

A week in, there are already 66 exhibits, some with multiple items.

There’s a “curb series” of photographs (showing the curb the Nissan allegedly jumped at Kingston Mills to get close to the water) and a “scuff series” (showing various black marks on the concrete where the Nissan is alleged to have entered the water) and a “Fitting the Lexus headlight pieces back together again” series of 51 slides (these definitively place the Lexus at Kingston Mills, which revealed the trio’s first story to police as a fraud).

There are gouge marks, scratches vertical and horizontal and those indicative of the Nissan rotating.

There are measurements of the two cars, the dead women (their weights were needed to figure out the Nissan’s weight and thus its centre of mass), distances (such as from the start of a rock outcropping to a fence pole, and from the front edge of a sluice to a set of stairs by the lock gate) and angles (the odd way the front seats were so far back inclined that driving would have been awkward, at the least).

Wednesday, OPP Constable Chris Prent, an expert in collision reconstruction, was in the stand.

His testimony was complex, with lots of geometry, but at its most simple, his opinion is that the Nissan didn’t go into the water under its own steam, but was pushed in by the Lexus, and that the push was needed because the Nissan got hung up on the lock gate, and that it isn’t plausible that a simple rear-end collision, such as the one belatedly described by Hamed months after his arrest, could explain the damage to the Nissan.

In short, Const. Prent said, the circumstantial evidence puts the Lexus there at the locks, pushing the Nissan, contrary to what Mama, Papa and Baby Bear first told police.

It isn’t sexy, like the wizardry of CSI, but it has heft.

Const. Prent will be cross-examined Thursday, after the visit to the locks.